Sunday, March 2, 2008

I really wanted to enjoy Frontlines: Fuels of War, especially after playing the multiplayer demo for a few weeks I was extremely pumped for the full version. I would daydream at work thinking about how cool it would be to drop in a large sum of enemies by parachuting out a helicopter and dropping grenades on them before touching down and wiping out who ever remained. After seeing how cool the two maps in the demo were I could only imagine how neat the other maps would be. Sadly, much like my hopes for the rest of the game; the other maps disappointed.

The story for the Frontlines Universe is one about oil. The newly formed Red Star Alliance, led by Russia and China, clash with Western Coalition forces over increasing energy shortages. This sets the stage for a massive conventional apocalypse pitting the biggest military powers against each other as they try to defend their interests and support their collapsing economies. So who's side will you take in this energy war? You won't! You're forced to play the Western Coalition and the Russians and Chinese are made out to be the bad guys in the game. First off, its a war over who gets superior control over the world's remaining energy; so to the player both sides have a pretty equal stance on just fighting for what they need to survive as a country. Instead we're given a one sided story of the situation and it really hurts putting any real drive for the player to take out his enemy other then not getting killed himself. Where's the drama?

By the end of the single player game, you don't really feel like you've achieved anything, but rather you feel like you've just captured another control point and instead of another mission loading; you get a credit sequence. You'll travel to a variety of different stages, but none of them feel truly groundbreaking or fresh from the other stages and the end result is it just feels like a training ground for the multiplayer portion of the game.

Obviously the better portion of this game is the multiplayer and if you haven't tried the demo yet then you'll be happy to hear that the developers put in some new ideas to try to make it more then just a Battlefield clone. Your regular characters classes are expanded by adding sub-classes, meaning that you can be a infantry elite character who can repair things and have more ammo or you can be drone specialist and call upon several smalls items of destruction that can drive or fly around the area. If your not the drone type, you can also use the EMP subclass and use your abilities to disable these drones, radars or even vehicles themselves. Want to call in death from above? Choose the air strike subclass and bomb your enemies to oblivion. While the drones are a fun class to be, some of the drones can be very hard to control on certain maps. I can't tell you how many times one of my RC cars were destroyed just because I couldn't get it out of a piece of map geometry, not only does it suck to lose your drone, but you look like an idiot with it just being stuck there. Hopefully a patch can address the control issues in the future.

The maps in the demo were certainly two of the best maps in the game as other maps feel messy and poorly put together. Unlike the Streets and Oilfield maps you never truly feel like your capturing anything worth wild and due to the lack of structure and cover at these points, you'll be killed many times before you can capture it. Another thing that the developers wanted to change from your typical Battlefield experience is that the attacking team is only given a certain amount of capture points to try to force you and your team mates to rally together on capture points and not have everyone spread out. While I can see why the developers thought this was a good idea, the downside is that it gives your defending enemy a massive advantage as to where all your attacking forces are going. Where in Battlefield, the mass amount of points added element of suspense and surprise to your enemy and would keep both sides on there toes in terms of counterattacks.

Graphically the game is decent, though it is no where near the quality of Halo 3 or Call of Duty 4 but they have come along way since the early single player demo we were given many months ago. The sound effects in the game are well mixed and do a great job of using surround sound. Multiplayer matches are easy to find and you can even find dedicated servers that will allow for smooth gameplay and very little lag.

The problem with the game is that when the multiplayer demo came out, it really gave you a complete taste of the actual game and the full version does nothing more to expand on that. After finishing the short single player campaign and playing all the other multiplayer maps I found myself playing Streets and Oilfield again. Why did I pay 60 bucks for a game when I can experience the best maps, and every feature of the full game for free by playing the demo version?

Frontlines is a decent game but it gets old quick, especially if you've been playing the multiplayer demo of the game for a long time. I can't recommend a buy on this one, but it would definitely be worth a good rental for the weekend. I can honestly say that the demo version was probably my most played demo game ever on the Xbox 360. On the downside my copy of the game is going to Gamestop tomorrow to be used as trade in credit for Condemned 2, if I have an itch to play Frontlines after that; I'll just re-download the demo. Maybe in the end, I'm still the winner.